March 23, 2015
Briefly
The “It’s not paranoia if..” issue
- A new initiative, Data Justice, concerned with widespread commercial data collection and analysis as a threat to privacy and equality.
- Some of the reasons that data-based decision making goes bad
- Trying to get “open” data in New Jersey: “initially refused to answer The Jersey Journal’s OPRA request because it didn’t make it on the agency’s standardized OPRA form, which wasn’t available on the NBHA website. Even after a reporter noted that in 2009 the state Supreme Court ruled standardized forms aren’t necessary, Earl wouldn’t accept a request on anything but the agency’s form.”
- Reidentification of ‘anonymised’ data: ‘When data is released after applying current ad-hoc de-identification methods, the privacy risks of re-identification are not just unknown but unknowable.’
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Having just had the experience of – finally -convincing someone that anonymised data is not necessarily protected I wish more would be aware of the last point.
In another experience I found it interesting that the researcher was quite happy to release anonymised client data. However they were horrified at my suggestion that they could release anonymised agency salary data to a newspaper analysing public sector salaries.
9 years ago